Starship & the Next Step-ChangeNarrow moat

Most incumbents defend a lead; SpaceX is trying to obsolete its own. Starship is a fully reusable vehicle, vastly larger than Falcon, designed to be caught and reflown rapidly and to cut the cost of orbit by another order of magnitude. If it works at scale, it does to Falcon 9 what Falcon 9 did to the expendable rockets before it — and it hands SpaceX the launch economics to build the next, far larger generation of Starlink and to attempt things (the Moon, Mars, enormous orbital payloads) that no one else can cost.

This is the optionality embedded in the valuation. A great deal of what the market is paying for is not today's Falcon business but the possibility that Starship turns SpaceX from the cheapest launcher into the only economically serious way to move real mass beyond Earth. It is a genuine call option on the future of spaceflight — and, like any option, it is worth a great deal if it lands and rather less if it does not — and a valuation of about $2.1 trillion already assumes a good deal of landing.¹